March262015

March082015

A rat would be placed in a cage and given two water bottles: one containing only water and one containing water that was laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat almost always preferred the drug water and almost always killed itself within a few hours. So there you go — that's our theory of addiction.

Bruce came along in the 1970s and said, Hang on a minute, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. He's got nothing to do, except use the drug water. Let's do this differently.

So Bruce built Rat Park. Rat Park was heaven for rats. Anything a rat could want, it got in Rat Park. It had lovely food, colored walls, tunnels to scamper down, other rats to have sex with. And they had access to both water bottles — the drug water and the normal water.

What's fascinating is that in Rat Park, they didn't like the drug water. They hardly ever used it. They only used it in low doses, none of them ever overdose and none used it in a way that looked compulsive or addictive.